Elise Hu

And clearly that story had a huge influence on you.

So what sorts of conversations did you have with him growing up about this?

Yeah.

But as you suggest in the talk and in your book, not all cult-like or cultish things are necessarily bad.

Loving Taylor Swift, for example, or people who go to SoulCycle religiously, that's not inherently bad and can lead to a lot of community building and feelings of connection.

Where is the line for you?

Yeah.

What do you think about parasocial relationships?

Because, you know, cults tend to have charismatic leaders.

I can't help but to hear you talk about cults and then especially when you're talking about like changing my beliefs about things or abandoning my previous positions on policy and seeing, you know, people who used to believe one thing completely believe something different because of a charismatic leader.

Yeah.

How is it that believers or members of certain groups continue to stay in the organization or continue to follow leaders who act against their interests?

How do we help people in our communities or people that we love, maybe who have gotten indoctrinated or we believe they've become indoctrinated?

How do we help them break out?

What do we say to them without pushing them away?

It's so tough.

You mentioned earlier that we are living in cultier and cultier times.

So I have to ask, what role do you think AI plays in all of this?

Because AI, especially the large language models that have bots that we can have conversations with, tend to be so sycophantic.

Before we wrap up, we'd love to do just a quick rapid fire round of questions to help listeners get to know you.